Academic Quality Assurance (AQA)

The policy suite consists of:

• PPL 3.30.03 Programs, Plans and Courses Quality Assurance – Policy
• PPL 3.30.04 Annual Programs, Plans and Courses Quality Assurance – Procedure
• PPL 3.30.05 Academic Program Review – Procedure

Guidelines will be coming soon.

The AQA dashboards were released in early July 2022; retention data for 2021 undergraduate cohort was made available mid-September.

Faculties and schools will have until mid-December to complete their annual review of programs and courses using the online response system. Faculties will also be requested to provide an overall response as to how they are managing courses with small enrolment numbers or courses with revenue that does not cover costs.

The purposes of Academic Quality Assurance for all programs, plans and courses offered at the University are to:

1. support the strategic objectives and regulatory requirements of the University
2. inform and assure the quality of academic offerings
3. support and enhance evidence-based decision making, on a cyclical basis
4. articulate the responsibilities of stakeholders in the quality assurance process.

The annual academic quality assurance process is guided by the following key principles:

• Programs and courses are reviewed on an annual basis according to the defined academic quality assurance indicators and informed by contextual data.
• Faculty and School staff may be asked to contextualise, further investigate, provide responses or develop action plans to address identified issues for programs, plans or courses.
• Responses and action plans will be submitted through the online response system.
• Consolidated Faculty reports are approved by the Executive Dean.
• The annual process must be completed by the end of each year.
• Data collected by the annual process must be incorporated into the report and resources for the subsequent year.

Diagram: Annual Academic Quality Assurance Process 2022

Planning and Business Intelligence (PBI) is responsible for updating the academic quality assurance reports for programs and courses with current data in UQ Reportal that Faculties and Schools can access:

• Prioritisation reports for relative annual performance of each program and course on each quality indicator to identify outliers.
• Detailed reports for detailed quality indicators and contextual data for each program and course.

The reports are accessible through UQ Reportal (UQ Reportal account required).

Training materials and videos are now accessible through the following links:

• Annual quality assurance process guide, pp. 7–16 (PDF, 1.3 MB)

Training videos:

• Video: Prioritisation reports (6m 16 s)
• Video: Detailed reports (4m 5s)

Responses and proposed action plans for programs and courses will be documented in the online response system. The responses are viewable only by a person who submitted the response, by Faculty executive, and by selected support staff.

The online response system will be open from July to December.

Training materials and videos are now accessible through the following links:

• Annual quality assurance process guide, pp. 17–21 (PDF, 1.3 MB)

Training videos:

• Video: Requesting response (2m 11s)
• Video: Responding (1m 38s)
• Video: Approving response (1m 3s)